The Idea:

Create a secure, live gateway to a girl’s world using mobile technology and in the process, empower her with employable skills for the future.

Key elements of the idea:

1. Recruit girls living in Northern Nigerian communities and arm them with bespoke mobile research technology, allowing her to directly collect insight in a peer-to-peer environment.

2. Design an interface that allows any girl, no matter what her education or tech know-how to safely collect a high volume of data and send it instantaneously to be translated, stored and analysed.

3. Use technology to overcome the safety barriers that usually preclude girls being equipped with mobile phones.

4. Train girls via MLearning, to become qualified Market Research Society digital qualitative and quantitative interviewers, also known as TEGAs (Technology Enabled Girl Ambassadors).

App

-The UX is designed so any girl can conduct research. To overcome low literacy, TEGAs’ communicate via emojis.

-Software is housed on a smartphone selected for its low value aesthetic, content creation abilities and battery life.

-Data is delivered reliably over unstable networks through torrenting techniques.

Safety Features

-Should a TEGA feel in danger, she can alert nearby community members via a panic button that operates assuming no Internet connection.

-To ensure data protection, device data vanishes once sent and respondent names are encrypted.

Content Hub

-The content hub programmatically analyses all data. By asking TEGAs to emoji tag data, we gain instant summaries (for example, girls are predominantly ‘confused’ when asked about economic empowerment rights).

Following 2 years' development and 3 Northern Nigeria pilots, TEGA has now been independently validated as a safe and credible methodology operating within the geographical, technological and social limitations of the developing world.

Following 2 years' development and 3 Northern Nigeria pilots, TEGA is validated by the MRS as safe and credible methodology operating within the geographical, technological and social limitations of the developing world.

TEGA completed pilot stage in January 2016. Since then TEGA has helped DFID Nigeria to understand disadvantaged youth to inform youth policies and Mercy Corps to understand the effectiveness of their safe spaces programme.

TEGA, born out of an urgent need to reach the northern Nigerian girl, is now being scaled across the developing world, creating a live gateway to hard reach communities for governments, NGOs and the private sector. Furthermore because TEGAs are paid, TEGA is building opportunities for girls with no economic path.

Compared to traditional research methodologies, TEGA is a highly scalable. We predict that by 2020 over 300 TEGAs will have reached over ½m girls, ensuring a brighter future for girls and their communities.